Father Geek here with this week's edition of our regular column that reports on all the news from the last week that you may have found yourself to preoccupied during the work-week to catch. And that's exactly why our man on the coast, Elston, puts this report together for you each week, so you can find ALL that cool, or uncool Hollywood news in one easy to find location...
The Weekly Recap...
TAKEN FROM VARIETY AND HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
CASTING
TAKEN FROM VARIETY AND HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
CASTING
* Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way Prods. picked up the script THE GARDENER OF EDEN from Adam "Tex" Davis. It's about a college dropout who returns to his hometown and receives unexpected accolades when he inadvertently saves someone's life. This inspires him to set up more would-be disasters so he can again benefit from saving the day.
* Regina King joins Reese Witherspoon in MGM's LEGALLY BLONDE 2: RED, WHITE & BLONDE for director Charles Herman-Wurmfeld. Shooting begins this month.
* Danny Huston is in talks to star opposite Nicole Kidman in Fine Line Features' BIRTH for director Jonathan Glazer. The story centers on a 10-year-old boy named David who falls in love with a 35-year-old woman. David then becomes convinced that he is the reincarnation of the woman's late husband.
* Annette Bening will star in BEING JULIA, based on W. Somerset Maugham's novel THEATRE, for director Istvan Szabo (SUNSHINE), producer Robert Lantos and Serendipity Point Films. Production begins in May from a script by Ronald Harwood.
* Bruce Willis will star in and produce HOSTAGE, based on the novel by Robert Crais, for Revolution Studios. It's about a former hostage negotiator turned small-town police chief who is forced into a hostage negotiation that is complicated by the fact that the family patriarch is an accountant for the mob.
* Halle Berry may star in a feature based on Jinx, the character she plays in the latest Bond film DIE ANOTHER DAY.
* Orlando Bloom will join Brad Pitt and Eric Bana in TROY, the adaptation of THE ILIAD, for director Wolfgang Petersen.
* Colin Farrell is in talks to star in Paramount Pictures/Mandalay Pictures' THE JACKET for director Antoine Fuqua, as well as the indie pic HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD for director Michael Mayer. The first project is about a man imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. While being tortured, he is able to foresee how and when he will be killed. By moving through altered states, he tries to figure out a way to prolong his life so he can solve his own murder. The second project is based on the Michael Cunningham novel about boyhood friends who grow up in Cleveland during the '60s and '70s and come from dysfunctional families. Now older, they move to New York and end up living together with an eccentric woman named Clare. The trio lead an unusual life together as one is gay and the other fathers Clare's baby.
* Tom Hanks and screenwriter Eric Roth (FORREST GUMP) are reteaming on an untitled pitch that Roth set up at Universal with Hanks attached to star and produce. The plot is being kept secret, though it's an original drama about a man trying to come to terms with the universe.
* Dennis Quaid will play NASCAR legend Richard Petty in a movie for Disney. Quaid will produce the project with Dan Halsted.
* Danny DeVito, Helena Bonham Carter, Steve Buscemi and Alison Lohman are in final talks to join negotations to join Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup and Jessica Lange in Columbia's BIG FISH for director Tim Burton.
* Sam Shepard and Neve Campbell will star opposite Val Kilmer in Millennium Films' BLIND HORIZON for director Michael Haussman will direct. Shooting begins at the end of the month. The story follows a man who has lost his memory after being shot in a small desert town in New Mexico. The man slowly begins to believe that he is linked to a plan to assassinate the president. Paul Benz and Steve Tomlin penned the script.
* Ben Affleck is in talks to star in the sci-fi thriller PAYCHECK, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, for director John Woo. It centers on an electrician who wakes up to discover his employer has erased his memory of the past two years as a security measure. When he tries to collect his paycheck, he finds he had previously signed a release replacing the money with a bag of random objects.
* William H. Macy, Lauren Holly and Scott Caan are shooting the thriller U-BOAT about a group of American POWs who are brought aboard a U-boat and find their loyalties tested when they're forced to join their German captors and fight for their lives. Jeremy Sisto, Til Schweiger and Thomas Kretschmann also star for director Tony Giglio.
DIRECTOR/WRITER ATTACHMENTS
* John Polson (SWIMFAN) will next direct the drama DEAL about an enterprising thief who teams with a distinguished lawyer to run a drug scam out of a posh Gotham hotel. They have an officer from the narcotics division providing protection.
* Burr Steers (IGBY GOES DOWN) is in talks to direct Universal's GAMBIT, a remake of the 1966 crime comedy of the same name that followed a man planning a heist who enlists a young woman as a gambit to help pull it off. Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the script to the latest project. Steers will do a rewrite before shooting the pic.
* Dan Gerson and Robert L. Baird (MONSTERS, INC.) will rewrite CURIOUS GEORGE, while Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant will rewrite THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN. Both projects are set up at Universal Pictures/Imagine Entertainment.
* Shawn Lawrence Otto will adapt David Masiel's novel 2182 kHz for producer Steven Pearl and ImageMaker Films. The story follows Henry Seine, a man haunted by his past who spends 16-hour days hauling heavy cargo in the Arctic. Desperate for human interaction, he often tunes his radio to 2182 kHz. When hearing a fading distress call, he puts together a motley team to save a stranded scientist.
* Ivan Reitman will direct the romantic comedy THE FOOL for Montecito Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures. Barry Fanaro wrote the script about the richest man in California and his seven wives and 12 daughters. The project is based on an unpublished novel of the same name by Susan Trott.
* David Benioff will adapt and executive produce a big-screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS for Warner Bros.
* Artists Production Group has optioned Jane Heller's latest novel, THE SECRET INGREDIENT, for Off Balance Prods. to produce. Heller will adapt her own work about a dissatisfied wife who tries to change her husband with the help of a magic potion. The quick fix proves disastrous when her overworked husband with a paunchy stomach and balding head becomes a hunk who is irresistible to women.
* Scott Frank will rewrite Playtone's Alan Ball-scripted period drama DOWNTOWN about a gay cop in the early 1960s who investigates the death of his lover in Cleveland. Tom Hanks is being eyed to star for director Ron Howard.
* Akiva Goldsman will rewrite CINDERELLA MAN, the boxing pic about Jim Braddock that is expected to star Russell Crowe for Universal/Miramax.
* New Line grabbed an untitled pitch for a thriller to be written by Jason Rothenberg and Bill Robinson, but is keeping the plot under wraps. Rothenberg will also rewrite THE FALL for Beacon Communications about an intense world class mountaineer whose parents are destroyed by a corporate scandal. The man begins wiping out the corporate culprits who have emerged without jail terms. Reluctantly opposing the vigilante is a prosecutor who was unable to prosecute the corrupt corporate heads. Rothenberg is also set to rewrite the Warner Bros. drama THE FIX, a sci-fi thriller about a drug company that hatches a "success" drug and secretly tests it on unsuspecting homeless people.
* Christopher Crowe will adapt the MGM/Phoenix Pictures project WARRIORS OF GOD, based on James Reston, Jr.'s novel about Richard the Lionheart, Saladin the fiercely contested battles over the Holy Land during the Third Crusade in the last years of the 12th century.
* Dan Milano ("Greg the Bunny" creator) and Matthew Huffman's script ME AND MY MONSTER was picked up by producer Laura Ziskin for Columbia Pictures. It's about a young boy who has a friendship with an extraordinary creature that changes the course of his life.
* Shawn Levy is in talks to direct the 20th Century Fox contemporary adaptation of the 1950 comedy CHEAPER BY THE DOZEN. Production begins in February.
* Luc Besson will direct a project based on his self-penned fairy tale ARTHUR ET LES MINIMOYS about a 10-year-old orphan, who is dragged into the magical world of the Minimoys.
* Rob Cohen is in negotiations to direct WARRIOR from a script by W.D. Richter for Columbia Pictures. It's about a pilot's effort to bring down a computerized fighter jet that has gone awry and is wreaking havoc.
MISCELLANEOUS PRODUCTION TIDBITS
* United Artists is in talks to acquire remake rights to the 1997 Japanese horror picture CURE, which Single Cell Prods. will develop. The project follows a wave of serial killings in which each of the victims is murdered in the same way, but with each murder the investigator catches a different killer who has no connection to the other slayings.
* DreamWorks picked up the remake rights to Akira Kurosawa's 1952 feature IKIRU about a low-level bureaucrat who learns he has terminal stomach cancer and leaves his job to find meaning in the year he has left to live. He then sets off to do one meaningful thing in life: build a children's park.
